Month: April 2011

I cranked up Tweetdeck early on Friday night to do my weekly check in. Unless I have a plan to implement I only check the feed about once a week.

I’m not really a user of Twitter, more a pusher. I mostly work with a bunch of other accounts than my main one.

But, when I heard that Pampers have a “follow me” request on every packet of nappies something clicked.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter was great when it first started, noise to signal ratio was very low and the exclusivity factor was attractive.

But the Pampers thing seemed to whiff a little.

I would still advise clients to cut traditional advertising and put it into new media, Twitter being one of those. Although you really need to know the landscape to truly use it to increase your ROI

Which is the point, right.

And you can use it effectively to promote your brand and develop a following.

Although I don’t take on many clients these days I still have a healthy bunch to whom I can share cutting edge techniques with and the point about cutting edge techniques is that few people are actually doing them.

“Only dead fish go with the flow.”

There are incredibly profitable techniques out there right now. And no I’m not going to give them away on a blog, even when I do tell people the process they don’t quite get it. Some of it is extremely counter intuitive.

The point is if you are feeding where the rest of the herd are, you are going to be drinking muddy water, with the odd floater sailing by.

Twitter is one big, muddy trough. Most people don’t mind that, and to be honest it’s all they need.

Some need to be where the herd hangs out, nothing wrong with that. If you have thousands of followers and you can sell to them, it makes perfect sense.

Observing the social media scene as someone who uses it as a business tool, rather than the social aspect I see there are certain reasons that some platforms succeed and some fail, making gentle hissing noise as they go.

Most don’t realise you can actually break most rules of social media and benefit from it. Too many “How to Tweet” books out there, which I find very useful when I need to nod off.

So, I thought I would break a few rules and throw something out there, just to see. Something that was a bit of nonsense.

I had the germ of an idea and probably in about 1 hour had bought a domain name, set up the web page, created a mailing list. I hadn’t done this for years, I usually get someone else to do it and the speed surprised me.

I called it Slagster.com I will invent a juicy tale of how I came up with the domain later.

After a few jokes about Angel investors and a failed IPO and a lot of nonsense Tweeting from me – I’m sure some people thought that Charlie Sheen had hacked into my account – I noticed someone else had already signed up a Twitter account for Splagster (good luck with that) and a bunch of people signed up to the email, without knowing what the hell what it was about.

Until now.

I do have the germ of an idea, something simple, something tasty, something counter intuitive. Not something for the IM crowd, but something designed to make a lot of noise and be disruptive.

It’s a challenge, and it’s exciting.

And it probably wont happen.

But that’s not the point. The point is to do something that sometimes does not make sense, even at the expense of attracting a few WTFs. It refills the reservoir and girds your loins. Not sure I want my loins girded, but anyway.

Splagster.com, it definitely will not be what you think, but sign up anyway.